Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

Quantitative Spatial Upscaling Of Categorical Data In The Context Of Landscape Ecology: A New Scaling Algorithm, Daniel Gann

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Spatially explicit ecological models rely on spatially exhaustive data layers that have scales appropriate to the ecological processes of interest. Such data layers are often categorical raster maps derived from high-resolution, remotely sensed data that must be scaled to a lower spatial resolution to make them compatible with the scale of ecological analysis. Statistical functions commonly used to aggregate categorical data are majority-, nearest-neighbor- and random-rule. For heterogeneous landscapes and large scaling factors, however, use of these functions results in two critical issues: (1) ignoring large portions of information present in the high-resolution grid cells leads to high and …